[Taxacom] ZooBank reality check: scanning and copyright

Thu Sep 7 06:29:32 CDT 2006

Regarding access to published materials, at antbase the following avenues
are followed.

1. Old publications, essentially all older than 75 years have been scanned.
There might be national copyright laws with different language which might
not even allow this, but since all the publication with such an age are
without any commercial interest, and our operation is purely for
non-commercial interests as well, we scanned them.

2. We ask (and keep asking) all the authors and the publishers. If they
agree, we put them up. If not we can't. For those we haven't asked (some of
those serials of which we have only a couple of articles) we put them up and
will put them down, if they wish.

3. Descriptions are factual knowledge. They therefore can not be
copyrighted, and they can be made online accessible. (see the xslt form of
the publications on http://antbase.org/databases/xml_docs.html). Our Taxonx
mark up schema does, among others, just that, delimiting those elements,
plus more inside the treatments. This allows also to take part of the
descriptions and put them into dedicated web sites (see
http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/ispecies/?q=Proceratium+google&#x0026
;#x0026;submit=Go). We start now to use this taxonx approach to produce
access to all the descriptions.

The publishing industry signals its interest in such as solution, that
treatments could be marked up in their xml version of publications, and thus
open them up for extraction of this part of the publication (not the entire
which will stay copyrighted), or makes them accessible for initiative such
as the Open Text Mining Initiative.

4. Self archiving is another option.

5. Trying to support such initiatives as the Biodiversity Heritage Library

6. Being involved in initiatives such as the Science Commons or Conservation
Commons (see for example http://informationcommonsforscience.org/).

7. Trying to build up the momentum that systematics publications will be
open access, be it through mandate (such as an agreement has to be signed
that the publication will be open access - it is at the end your taxpayers
money who paid for almost the entire content including peer review (ie
quality control), and not the publisher). This means, we need enough good
example like the fungi, ants, the American Museum of Natural History showing
the huge impact and need such a system has (see the clustrmap in antbase.org
to show the geographic extent, and the stats of the downloads once the AMNH
released their publications into the public.

8. Try to describe the situation in more general terms, such as in Nature
(http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7075/pdf/439392a.pdf) or in
other media (ie newspapers, etc.)

8. Eventually launch a dedicated open access journal itself.

This in a nutshell the various activities. It seems to me, that if we can
demonstrate the usage and value of systematics publications far beyond the
specialists communities, there is no other solution than going open access.
Publishers which do not follow this practice will become obsolete - the new
generation of scientists and especially the public does not read paper
anymore. And can any scientist afford to stay behind?

Finally, this all needs a name server in the background - we have that for
ants, luckily - but if we talk biodiversity, we need ZooBank. Antbase will
never be paid for by NSF or NIH or in fact an international body as happened
to GenBank - but ZooBank or better SpeciesBank in general, linked to all the
descriptions will be paid for. It will become an indispensable element of
science and industry.

Donat

Dr. Donat Agosti
Science Consultant
Research Associate, American Museum of Natural History and Naturmuseum der
Burgergemeinde Bern
Email: agosti at amnh.org
Web: http://antbase.org
Blog: http://biodivcontext.blogspot.com/
Skype: agostileu
CV
Current Location
Dalmaziquai 45
3005 Bern
Switzerland
+41-31-351 7152

In ants (better antbase.org) we 

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Bob Mesibov
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 11:48 AM
To: TAXACOM
Cc: Hallan, Joel (biocat)
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] ZooBank reality check

Re the fungi and ant scanning/distributing projects:

A leading authority in my field, who edits a specialist journal, has flatly
refused to allow the journal to be made available in PDF form. He wrote:

"Not sympathetic with the idea of making the contents (text) available free
to everybody in the world. Over the years I have paid for over half the
printing and postal costs, and work on the principle that people do not
value anything that is free. I think that users should shoulder some of the
cost of production, even if only a few actually ever buy parts or subscribe
to the thing by volume."

A second authority also refuses to let his published work be digitised.
Further, after I had scanned a large number of his illustrations (vital in
this particular group's taxonomy) and formatted them for a taxonomic
website, I was told by the authority that he didn't want them to be used in
this way. He regards some uses of his work as outright plagiarism and wants
taxonomists and others to go to his original publications.

I'm wondering whether something similar has happened in the ant and fungi
literature digitising, and if so, how these gaps in the digitised literature
are handled by your bibliographic portals.
---
Dr Robert Mesibov
Honorary Research Associate, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery
and School of Zoology, University of Tasmania
Home contact: PO Box 101, Penguin, Tasmania, Australia 7316
(03) 64371195; 61 3 64371195

Tasmanian Multipedes
http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/zoology/multipedes/mulintro.html
Spatial data basics for Tasmania
http://www.utas.edu.au/spatial/locations/index.html
---

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